Lawsuit Contends Crypto Founder Trump Pardoned Was Up to His Eyeballs in October 7 Terrorist Financing

There are very few people who will make a loud or detailed defense of President Trump’s pardon of Changpeng Zhao, the convicted founder of the crypto exchange Binance, beyond “you just don’t understand crypto!” or “he pled guilty as part of Joe Biden’s war on crypto!”

Unsurprisingly, federal prosecutors saw it quite differently, and contended that Zhao and Binance caused “significant harm to U.S national security” through his criminal acts and “violated U.S. law on an unprecedented scale . . . in January 2020, blockchain-analytics firm Chainalysis reported that in 2019 Binance processed $770 million in funds from illicit actors.” They contend Zhao and Binance “willfully failed to report well over 100,000 suspicious transactions that it processed as a result of its deficient controls, including transactions involving terrorist organizations, ransomware, child sexual exploitation material, frauds, and scams.”

When an employee of the company wrote, “Is washing drug money too hard these days Come to Binance we got cake for you,” it is extremely difficult to believe the company was oblivious to the fact that criminal groups were using it to move money.

It is also less than reassuring that when asked about Zhao after issuing the pardon, Trump answered, “I don’t know who he is.” Well, Mr. President, if you’re going to give someone a pardon, you probably should know who he is.

Still, there are probably some folks out there who still think what Zhao did wasn’t that bad, and that Trump was entirely justified in giving him a full pardon. Those folks are very, very wrong:

Families of victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel sued Binance Monday, claiming that the world’s largest cryptocurrency trading platform — and its recently pardoned founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao — helped smooth the transfer of more than $1 billion to the accounts of terror groups responsible for the atrocity.

But the nearly 300-page complaint stated that Binance’s conduct was “far more serious and pervasive than what the US government disclosed” during those proceedings — and that the company “knowingly sent and received the equivalent of more than $1 billion to and from accounts and wallets controlled by the [foreign terror organizations] responsible for the October 7 Attacks.”Those include Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to the suit brought by attorneys at Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP, Osen LLC, Stein Mitchell Beato & Missner LLP, and Motley Rice LLC.

“To this day, there is no indication that Binance has meaningfully altered its core business model,” the attorneys said in the suit, alleging the crypto platform was “intentionally designed as a criminal enterprise to facilitate money laundering on a global scale.”

Ali Mohammad Alawieh, the son of Hezbollah commander Muhammad Abd al-Rasul Alawieh, is the holder of one of the Binance accounts identified in the lawsuit.

…Zhao remains a majority owner of Binance, which the Oct. 7 victims’ families maintain “knowingly, willfully, and systematically assisted Hamas, the IRGC, Hezbollah, PIJ, and other terrorist groups to transfer and conceal the equivalent of hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars through the Binance platform in support of their terrorist activities.”

Wait, you’re telling me the U.S. government is shirking its duties, asleep at the wheel, oblivious to the most nefarious wrongdoing and letting terrorists get their hands on a giant pile of money? What do you think this is, the state of Minnesota?